Exchange on Modernism

Below is a little conversation that took place on Facebook. I quoted Marshall Berman's 'All That is Solid Melts Into Air'--which is a really enjoyable read--and opined on the meaning of modernism (also read: modernity) in contemporary times. Some friends of mine chimed in... 

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(Me:) "To say that our society is falling apart is only to say that it is alive and well." - Marshall Berman, 'All That is Solid Melts Into Air' But I wonder if this still rings true. What can be said for modernism (either the adventurous or the routine) when places like Stockton, CA and Detroit simultaneously exist? These are the thoughts I have at half past midnight...

(Al:) The Roman empire fell amidst chaos and something evolving replaced it. Maybe we are at a similar spot on that historical timeline. Change is inevitable, be it the world in which we live or the human condition itself. Humans look at snapshots of their lives .. 2, 5, 10 years at a time and somehow feel that same stability should somehow naturally be perpetual, but instead it is the most unnatural thing that could be. The failures with Stockton & Detroit and approaching failures with dozens of other cities have direct cause and effect. A large segment of our society is too blind to see this cause. Once that segment becomes the majority, the city is doomed and will fail. We might be five years away or fifty from complete collapse in our government and society as we know it. It depends on this current rate of change. I for one remain hopeful it is reversible and self correcting. Thanks for the thought provoking post.

(Me:) Sure. I think Berman would agree with your basic idea of the ebb and flow of human history. What you’re getting at (in Bermanian terms) is “adventure modernism” (i.e. people are going to continue on, searching for the next great part of existence; the destruction they suffer is only at the result of creation; they are trying to not only look into the abyss, but go into it, and survive it, and come back from it with a better understanding, etc. etc.). In these terms, I think his point would be: the fact that there is unrest is a sign that people are toiling away, working towards the future, perpetually creating and destroying. We’re just witnessing that next paradigmatic shift, the next stage of modernism in the United States. As a result, some things are going to go to the wayside in order for the next “thing” to take the stage. And this may still be so.

But my point is simply this: I don’t see it. Detroit suffered for a new modernism—corporate capitalism, globalization, deindustrialization, the White Flight, etc. etc. all played huge factors to the decline of this once blossoming metropolis. For Detroit, and other (mainly Rust Belt) cities in the USA, it dies a slow and painful death so that the new modern life of the suburbs can arise. Smash cut to now where even the suburbs are declining—large swathes of homeowners underwater on their mortgages, houses foreclosed and left to rot, education systems defunded almost annually (ceremoniously depending on whom you ask), even what were once the Crystal Palaces of suburbia (the malls) are now vacant either of stores or people—across the nation in places like Stockton, Grand Rapids, MI, Lakewood, CO, Jefferson County, AL, Harrisburg, Boise, Central Falls, RI, and the list goes on. So with all this in mind, I ask myself: “What are we building towards? What is the next step in modernism?” And I find no satisfactory answer. The end of feudal society came about from the mobilization to cities, centuries later the destruction of slums in Paris, London, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Beijing were to build new asphalt roads, concrete walkways, steel buildings, and more for greater modern cities, and in turn some of these like-cities were abandoned for the greater megastructures of the new modern exurbs/suburbs, but now we are witnessing urban AND suburban decay with no obvious paradigm to shift to next. I look around and I see paralysis at best, and retrograding at worst. The soil that used to be so loose has now ossified, and we find ourselves waste deep, stuck, waiting for some unknown future.

This is what I was getting at last night. There is no pastoral left to escape to and build great structures upon anymore. We are left in our ruins now. Of course societies will continue to exist, in one form or another, but will they continue to modernize?

(Joe:) Greed was the catalyst for the fall of the Roman Empire and with history being cyclic, we are at the threshold of the same future for the same reason. Too much wealth in the hands of too few while the rest are left to grovel. It is easy to say "Well everyone has the same opportunity". You have to be an idiot to really believe that. And now, one of the popular trends is to suck the very life out of this country and take it off shore. So, what does the future hold? Well if we don't succeed in blowing up the planet, regardless of the depths to which society falls, there will always be a tomorrow and those individuals who will give their all to effect a resurection [sic] of the good life.

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Though it may appear as if Al and Joe were on different talking points than mine, I do think they were speaking about modernism--even if their comments were more politically motivated. 

Berman wrote 'All That is Solid...' in the seventies up to the early eighties (the book being published in 1982). In it, Berman argues against the notion that we were living in a "post-modern" USA. He wrote...

To be modern, I said, is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.

By this assertion, everything is modern. There can never be a next phase, no "post" anything. We have always been modern--err... starting with Baudlaire. Which is confusing because if we are to use his own logic--that everything eventually breaks down and becomes replaced (or in Marxist terms "all that is solid melts into thin air")--then "modernism" itself should be vulnerable to its own nature. Shouldn't it?

I'm going to refrain from answering for now.

Instead, I want to opine further on Berman's idea of modernism precisely as a positive event in human history. My initial post focused (perhaps loosely) on this thought. In reading Berman, I had the overwhelming impression that modernism was not only an unavoidable force of human nature, but that it was (more or less) the impetus for progressive change (i.e. change for the better of society). From paving the roads in cities in the mid-19th century to the creation of sprawling suburbs in the mid-20th century, and from Russian literature to the New Deal, these are all moments of modernism that highlight positive changes--even in oppressive "backwards" societies.* I have a problem with this.

For instance, Berman devotes a considerable amount of time on Russian literature (more precisely Russian life in St. Petersburg from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth--viewed through the literature). Berman lauds Russian writers like Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Nevsky, Dudkin, Mandelstam, et al. for their sharp wit in combating the oppressive realities of their lives. In his eyes, their literature is the basis for modernism--what he called the "modernist adventure"--and their writings were a sign that even in a place like oppressive Tsarist Russia (which he likened to many Third World countries of the twentieth century) such thoughts could exist. And they existed exactly because of a more modern city like St. Petersburg was created and allowed for such modernist thought to blossom. Huzzah!

That's really great and all, but... uh... like what about all those poor serfs (hundreds of thousands of them) who died in the mud of the Neva to create that great modernist city? What about the fact that the reason those serfs were working to death was because they were slaves to the nobility? Or that all this great literature is being primed by the subjugation of the lesser fortunate (the Clerk) at the hands of their masters (the Tsar)? (Dostoevsky knows something of that oppression... 'How are winters in Siberia?') Or that these lesser fortunate people--many who contributed most to the better future--suffered disproportionately as a result of it? Hey Berman! what about all the modernist serfs who built the future and who longed to go beyond the squalid conditions of oppressive Tsarist Russia... and then oppressive Stalinist Russia... and now oppressive Putinist Russia... where is their modernism? What positive outcome have they benefited from?**

Or to put this in terms that hit closer to home, what about the African American experience, Berman? The success of nascent United States (especially the South) is in large part thanks to slaves. But maybe that's unfair because modernism didn't start for Berman until the mid-nineteenth century... oh wait... they were still slaves in the 1850s! and then they were disproportionately poor and disenfranchised and terrorized for another one-hundred years, and for the last 50 years they've had the oddest looking equality I can think of. But let me provide some "modernist" specifics. The New Deal. Great modernist event. The creation of the welfare state that played a huge role in the prosperity of many Americans--essentially creating the middle class. What could possibly be wrong with that? Well... um... many of the programs were at the expense of blacks because of white supremacy. How 'bout that? Case in point: the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) provided cash benefits to farmers for work done in the field. However, a disproportionate number of blacks (yes, even more than poor white sharecroppers) were swindled out of their appropriations by the (white) landowners. If this sounds familiar, it's because similar instances happened with the Tennessee Valley Authority (the inspiration for the Marshall Plan), the Federal Land Bank, the Rural Electrification Administration, etc. etc. Or what about blacks living in urban US environments who suffered from the likes of the Robert Moseses of the nation (who constructed roads and buildings right through their neighborhoods--on towards a better future no doubt), or whites during the '50s and '60s who fled the urban areas, and took refuge in the suburbs, along with most of the work... but hey, you know, they have Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin to, like, write about their plight, so modernism still exists... and it's great!

This is all becoming a little too exhaustive and redundant. And I don't mean to go all Howard Zinn on Berman. I like the book. I like Berman's views of modernism. But perhaps what makes this all so frustrating is that Berman knows, is completely aware of what I'm writing about! The beginning of 'All That is Solid...' is about Goethe's Faust and the relation it plays with modernism/modernity and how Faust's accomplishments come at his own undoing (not to mention the deaths of innocent people). So Berman admits at the beginning of his book that we're talking about tragedy here! A tragedy brought upon by negligence that ultimately ends up spelling out "d-o-o-m."

This gets be back to answering that question I posed above.

Modernism has what I've started calling the "duality of construction"--which is to say, in modernity's construction of a better future it is simultaneously creating/meliorating new life, and destroying/exacerbating an old one. This even applies to itself. Even Berman admits this, though he believes modernism replaces itself with itself, and not some "other" epoch. But I'm not so sure. I believe that, like Faust, modernism can reach a point of limitation and then destroy itself.

And this brings me back to my original question, and Al and Joe's responses. When I asked "What can be said for modernism (either the adventurous or the routine) when places like Stockton, CA and Detroit simultaneously exist?" Al and Joe both gave (in their own way) witness to modernism's duality of construction. They both see the ebb and flow. The ability for humanity to create and destroy in an almost breathless daily fashion, indefatigably towards the unforeseen future. And in this sense, I believe they both still have faith in modernism--even in their own bleak ways.

But not me. Yes, the sun will rise and set until it explodes, but I'm curious as to whether or not it will rise on a modern United States or not. I for one am dubious. For good reason, too.

What good is modernism if people suffer for their entire lives as a result of it? What are we even creating things towards nowadays anyway? Tax cuts? Hyperloops? The new iPhone 6? What good are these new things if A) they only tend to benefit people who are already in a position to benefit from them? B) they aren't actual benefits? The tragic negligence seems afoot here too!

I'll go a further step and state that it is precisely this "tragic negligence" of modernity that causes the current state of paralysis, and because of it that modernism has fallen back on itself and is no more. We have allowed the suburbs and the urban environments to decay, and ourselves to slip into anomie, all for a future that appears to survive solely in the realm of "pop." For these reasons I do believe we are truly (now more than ever) living in a "postmodern" world.

I don't see this as a bad thing. I don't see it as a good thing. Like many postmodern things, I suppose it just is...
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* Note: Berman does not necessarily make note of suburbs or the New Deal in 'All That is Solid...' but I believe they fit well with his notion of modernism.
** And yes, I realize Russians no longer live like they did in the nineteenth century, but that doesn't mean oppression has disappeared... especially if you happen to be gay.